I paired this beer with: Salmon filets with fennel and leeks wrapped with foil and then placed on the grill to be steamed in its own juices. Yummy!!!!

Tasted on: Thursday July 21, 2011

Notes: This beer pours a hazy yellowish gold with a fluffy almost 3 finger white head which lingered until I was about halfway done with my glass leaving a sticky lacing on my glass.

The nose was like whiffing a flowery perfume with some sweet citrus and bubblegum.

The taste starts off slightly sweet and like you’re drinking a bouquet of flowers. A very nice bouquet of flowers that is. I also picked up some citrus and honey. Near the finish this beer ending on a dry note.

This beer had a medium to light body with a low to medium carbonation level.

The drinkability was good, but just a little bit too sweet for my idea of a perfect saison. The 8.2% abv was undetectable.

On the Label: 97678 by 6/12 14. Ale Brewed With Flowers and Rose Water.

Cuvée des Fleurs is a unique brew of our own imagination. We flavor this distinguished ale with a variety of flowers, including L. augustifolia, A. nobilis, C. officinalis and a generous amount of H. lupus.

From their website: Cuvèe des Fleurs roughly translates to “batch of the flowers”. This most distinctive ale is flavored with a variety of edible flowers. Aromatic and medicinal flowers such as Lavender, Chamomile, Calendula, Rose Hips and Hops (they’re flowers too!) are added to this special brew to impart a distinct aroma and flavor.

My friend Stu returned from California with a nice haul of “West Coast” beers not available in S. Florida. His philosophy is that good beer is meant to be shared, so he invited a small handful of friends to his backyard for a great beer tasting on Saturday.

The Beer "Waiting Room"

Above is what I called the Beer “Waiting Room”. This is a photo before more beer was added as guests arrived.

I have listed the beers in the Order we drank them. Our method of picking our next beer was very random. We would just go to the beer “Waiting Room” stick in our hand and pull out a beer, most of the time not knowing what we were going to pull out. It actually worked out quite well this way, as you will see the styles did vary and kept palate fatigue at bay. We were able to taste 21 different beers style from the 26 beers we had.

Note: This is a very drinkable beer. I didn’t find much wrong with it, but nothing stood out to make me give it more than a good rating, as I have had many Bière de Garde’s which I’ve liked better. I believe this beer would be a great cross over beer for craft beer novices or for you to offer to someone that you would like to introduce to the craft beer scene.

On the Label: Biere de Mars (French for “March beer”) is a special style of beer created at farmhouse breweries in northern France. Brewed in winter with a fresh crop of malt and hops. It was always the brewer’s favorite. True to tradition, Southampton Biere de Mars is an artfully crafted amber ale with subtle complexity and a crisp finish..

From their website:Southampton’s Biere de Mars is brewmaster Phil Markowski’s classic interpretation of an authentic French farmhouse-style Biere de Mars. Our version is brewed with a blend of wheat and barley malts and a generous amount of continental hops. It is cool fermented and aged to give it a clean, smooth, lager-like character.